250 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



New buds are constantly being developed, and these grow 

 into new animals ; and as the plant in due season produces 

 flowers, and as seeds and new plants are therefrom 

 developed, so the zoophyte will sooner or later produce its 

 reproductive bodies, and from these latter true eggs will 

 spring. Each egg, after passing through a denned series of 

 changes, will ultimately develop into a single little animal 

 form; and this primitive member will root itself to some 

 fixed object, and by a veritable process of budding will 

 produce in time the zoophyte-colony with which develop- 

 ment began. Crabbe wrote of the zoophytes, in a past 

 generation, that 



" Involved in sea-wrack here you find a race 

 Which science, doubting, knows not where to place ; 

 On stone or rock is dropped the embryo-seed, 

 And quickly vegetates a vital breed." 



And even if our knowledge of the zoophytes has materially 

 advanced and progressed since the days of Crabbe, such 

 advance does not in the slightest degree dispel the wonder 

 with which the naturalist must ever regard these organisms, 

 which thus present themselves to the eye as a race of 

 animals exhibiting all the recognisable appearances and 

 many of the intimate characteristics of plants. 



From amongst our pond and water weeds, and from 

 the sea, we may obtain specimens of other animals, which, 

 like the zoophytes, are so plant-like, that the unscientific 

 observer could not by any chance hesitate to pronounce 

 them as objects for the investigation of the botanist. Such 

 are those animals named polyzoa, beings by no means of 

 the lowest grade of animal organisation, but related in 

 all essential points of their structure to the true shell-fish 

 or molluscs. It forms the best possible proof of the success 

 of nature's mimicry, in causing such animals to grow in 

 the likeness of plants, that sea-side visitors of botanical 

 tastes almost invariably gather those common polyzoa, the 

 "sea-mats" or Flustrce, in mistake for sea-weeds. The sea- 



